06 February 2017

If you have a corrupted word doc on your mac and word just refuses to open it, the Internets of course have many helps for you, including but not limited to the great advice from Microsoft itself : how to troubleshoot damaged documents in word for mac (spoiler: the solution involves copy-pasting the word "test")

Actually, it's worse than that, the friendly dialog word offers says (more or less) "I can't open this file because it's corrupt. You should open this file and repair it". Duh ... the problem is I can't open it in the first place.

In any case, none of the many helps worked for me, so here's a hare-brained scheme I hatched all by myself : mail the file to yourself, open it on your ubuntu laptop using LibreOffice. Guess what ... it worked! "Save As" something sensible, mail it back to yourself on your mac, open again with Word. Word complained a little about unorthodox characters (specifically, the letter "V" ... who knows why...) but the opening was ultimately successful.

Anyway, this little post is another little piece of help on top of the great big pile of helps that make up the internets. I hope it helps you one day.

22 January 2017

Installing gem rmagick on ubuntu is almost worse than installing mysql gems used to be!

You will get a variety of errors depending on the version of ubuntu, the version of imagemagick, the various imagemagick libraries, and the version of rmagick you have installed or want to install. I mostly suffered from "checking for wand/MagickWand.h... no", "Can't install RMagick 0.0.0." (dunno where the version number went), "*** extconf.rb failed ***", among others.

Ubuntu 14.04 supports imagemagick 6.7.7-10 and no later version. Ubuntu 16.04, on the other hand, doesn't offer anything earlier than 6.9.

According to tellnes, newer versions of imagemagick will not work with rmagick, although the rmagick page says: "Version 6.4.9 or later")

I didn't take the trouble to try the apt packages one-by-one to figure out the minimal set of packages rmagick needs to install successfully.

Note, "this works for me" ... it probably won't work for you. Google can point you to a large number of absolutely sure fixes for this problem, all of which worked for their authors, and none of which worked for me.

11 December 2013

MySQL documentation ain't what it used to be; it took some experimenting to figure out how to get a utf string into my db from the command-line client interface.

The problem is that for some reason when I run mysql on my server through ssh, non-latin characters just get dropped. It might be an ssh config thing, you never know, but I explored the mysql avenue first.

Here's what I found. Suppose you want to update a field containing some non-ascii character, like "à", like this:

13 November 2013

Although not entirely ... the gems at the bottom of the list are either very recent (rspec_numbering_formatter), or kinda utterly pointless (ageism). On average, older gems have more downloads. Top of the list is protopack, which is actually useful as a way to store objects as YAML for later resurrection, kind of like test fixtures, but in a production context, with liberal meta-data sprinkled on top. You would think that sepa would end up being most popular though, as it's made for a critical bit of business - preparing SEPA direct debits, using the ISO 20022 xml standard (also known as "pain.008.001", although all banking standards are a pain so in this case "pain" is banking shorthand for "payments initiation"). It's newer than protopack though, so time will tell.

One more piece of data: none of the corresponding github repositories have issues opened. There are several ways to interpret this:

an army of bots is dedicated to downloading my stuff and archiving for posterity it all over the internet, but they don't take any more interest beyond downloading

03 October 2013

An EFF article reports that Tim Berners-Lee, director of W3C, the standards body that attempts to specify what web browsers do, approves the inclusion of DRM restrictions in a forthcoming HTML specification.

As the EFF article points out, this new direction is likely to damage the W3C's already less-than-stellar reputation as a respectable standards body. Which is a pity, because the web is a better place when we can all agree on interoperability standards.

Your web browser, whether on your laptop or on your phone, behind the scenes, is called a User Agent. This means it represents you, the "User", giving you much freedom in the way you experience the internet. With DRM restrictions built-in, your browser becomes a copyright-enforcement-agent, and you risk losing many of the freedoms you have enjoyed up to now. We are entering a terrifying new era where government itself is the enemy; DRM is a major piece of armour in favour of centralised power and against The People.